Road Trip

~For my birthday (last Wednesday), I decided to go on a road trip to Fairfax, Virginia, because I wanted to experience the joys of D.C.-area traffic.  Ok, I was actually in the area for an interview, but I did manage to look around the town a bit and take a few pictures:

^ The Fairfax Museum and Visitor Center.  I found some useful maps here.  I didn't have time to look through the museum, but it's supposed to have an impressive Civil War collection and displays.

^ University Boulevard, just outside of the gigantic Fairfax City Regional Library (which, of course, I had to visit).

^ Fenwick Library, on the main (Fairfax) campus of George Mason University.  This picture doesn't do it justice; there's a huge tower connected to it just to the right of this image, housing the main stacks.

^ The Johnson Center at George Mason University, a sort of combined student union, library, computer center, and office building.  Also, as I found out, a good place to get a late lunch.

^ Guess who?

Creating Humans: Ethical Questions, Part 2

~Lecture 2 of Creating Humans dealt with a question central to reproductive ethics: When does life begin?  For many people, this is an easy, blatantly obvious answer, and they cannot understand why other people might want to answer this question differently.  We've all heard these answers, mostly in the context of abortion.  The pro-life crowd howls, "Life begins at conception!".  The pro-choice crowd snaps that "Life begins at birth!"  There is no middle ground in the arena of moral absolutes.

[Source: Englehart, Bob. "When Does Life Begin?" The Hartford Courant: 1981.]

That being said, the lecture makes the point that although people don't morally agree on a definition of when life begins, the actual law in place in the U.S. and U.K. is in fact an elaborate series of compromises between the two extremes.  This results in the law being rigid in some areas of assistive technology, and slack in others.  This is especially apparent with newer technologies that either do not loom large in the public imagination, or are morally ambiguous.  For example, some U.S. state laws are as restrictive as possible in limiting abortion, but allow IVF and prenatal screening almost without regulation.  It's easy for politicians to score points with voters by taking a very public position on a hot-button issue, while ignoring a morally-equivalent issue that doesn't get the same amount of press (this comes up again in the lecture on cloning).

Much of lecture 2 was devoted towards attempting to establish a scientific, objective definition for when a person is really a "person" and thus entitled to legal protection.  Although I found the science in this area to be interesting, I also thought it was mostly a waste of time to apply such science to the law.  Regardless of what the facts are, I don't think any definition will find universal acceptance; the emotions simply run too high, and are too tightly bound to the endless, fossilized abortion "debate".  It would be nice if we could agree on a definition to help guide us in the use of other reproductive technologies, but I don't think it's going to happen in a social sense.  Even (or rather, especially) any attempt at a legal definition would be subject to endless attack.

• My view: an embryo is a "person" once it's actually embedded in a person and growing on its merry way.  I don't think that an embryo fertilized in a lab and sitting in all of its single-celled glory is a "person", and I don't think that fertilizing (and discarding) embryos for IVF or screening is somehow a monstrous crime against humanity or first-degree murder of a child, etc.  But there is one major caveat to my definition: I have no desire whatsoever to legally impose it on anyone by force.  This is one of many reasons why I would make a terrible judge or politician; I'm no good at condemnation.  Does this mean that I am a wicked/weak, immoral person?

• Despite what I've said above about moral absolutism, I've found that the truth is actually much more fungible (great word, fungible).  Some people -- I would go so far as to say many people -- will quickly abandon deeply-held beliefs if doing so somehow benefits them personally.  They are just as quick to revert to their previous position later on.  It's part of how our brains work; humans, like other organisms, are evolved to adapt to changing circumstances.  For example, consider the essay "The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion", a collection of exceptionalist anecdotes (displaying a very American mentality).  Another theoretical example would be a parent who also believes that life begins at conception, but upon discovering they and/or their partner are having fertility problems, will search out reproductive technology such as IVF...while still clinging to their absolutism.  We might shake our heads and call these people hypocrites, but I think it's important not to judge them.  Remember, don't judge someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes (that way, you're a mile away, and you have their shoes).

• Please consider this question: when do you think a fertilized embryo becomes a "person"?  Are you a moral absolutist, with no room for compromise?  If your definition is based solely on your beliefs regarding abortion, please try for a moment to look beyond that ossified debate and think about how your definition might affect your views on other forms of reproductive technology, such as in-vitro fertilization, screening for diseases, genetic enhancement, cloning, and so forth.  Consider what you would do if you or someone you love needed or wanted to use one of these technologies.

LOL OIL

~With all the concern over the BP oil spill, car company bailouts, "cash for clunkers", and inevitable future energy shortages, one California driver mocks all others cars on the road:

^ (posted on imgur, found via reddit)

The orange car with the license plate "LOL OIL" is a Tesla Roadster, an all-electric sports car produced by Tesla Motors.  It can travel approximately 244 miles on a single charge and goes from 0-60 mph in 3.7 seconds.  It creates no emissions, needs no gasoline or motor oil, and can be plugged in from a home charging unit.  It also needs much less maintenance than a combustion-powered vehicle.  From wikipedia:

"Electric vehicles require much less service and maintenance than internal combustion engine vehicles. They do not require routine oil changes. They do not have any tailpipe emissions and therefore do not require any muffler or exhaust system work. They do not require replacement spark plugs, pistons, hoses or belts. The conventional parts of the car—including the brakes, body work and any interior and HVAC work—can be performed by any qualified automotive technician, exotic car garage or other local provider."

The Roadster currently retails for around $100,000, but has proved very popular and over a thousand have been sold in less than two years.  A recent partnership with Toyota has bolstered plans for Tesla Motors to mass-produce a less-expensive, all-electric sedan.  Than last sentence used up my hyphen quota for today, so I'll stop writing for now.

Creating Humans: Ethical Questions, part 1

~To pass the time, lately I've been listening to audio courses in the Modern Scholar series, which I obtained from (where else?) the library. I've finished Ideas that Shaped Mankind, which was very enlightening, and now I'm working on Creating Humans: Ethical Questions Where Reproduction and Science Collide. The course lecturer (and reader) is none other than Alexander McCall Smith, who, aside from authoring the best-selling No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of mystery novels, is also one of the world's foremost authorities on medical law and ethics.

Unlike the course in Ideas that Shaped Mankind, Creating Humans deals with extremely controversial questions that arouse intense feelings in some people over pertinent issues of intervention in the process of human reproduction. Some of the issues everyone has heard of and most have a strong opinion on (for example, abortion rights). Other issues fall into a more ambiguous ethical category, or are simply not something most people think about (for example, prenatal screening or the ethics of surrogacy or intensive care). And some emerging technologies will have a significant impact on human society. As for myself, the topic of ethics and technologies in reproduction has special significance because I have two young relatives who would not exist without the use of technology that did not exist scant decades ago.

It's up to us, as a nation and as a species, to decide how we're going to deal with these issues. Some people simply don't want to deal with the difficult questions of reproductive ethics, so their solution is to ban them all (such opinions are often religiously motivated). At the other extreme are those who think that reproduction is such an intensely private matter that nobody has the right to interfere with parental choice, and that whatever they decide to make use of is their own business. In listening to McCall Smith's lectures and considering the questions in the course guide, I believe the best (indeed, the only practical) response falls between the two extremes. Some of these technologies arouse little protest and have little potential for harm, while others are potentially very dangerous and need to be carefully regulated to prevent harm to both the resultant offspring and to human society as a whole.

All of what I've written up until now is a very broad outline of what the course is about, but I will soon get into specifics. For each of the fourteen lectures in the course, I've taken notes and written my own observations, thoughts, and questions -- which I would like to share with you, my dear readers. In some cases, I've drawn conclusions about how I feel and what I think should be done, but in general the complexity of the issues defies a quick and easy solution. I would love to hear (via comment or email) what you think about these issues, regardless of whether or not you agree with me. If you'd like to follow along, you can download a course guide from the course web site; if you want to know more, you may be able to find this course at (where else?) your local library. I've tried to divide up information and questions from the lecture from my own thoughts; the former are paragraphs, the latter are bulleted.

And so without further ado, here are my brief thoughts on...

--Lecture 1: An Overview of the Techniques for Creating Humans--

As the title suggests, this first lecture is a broad survey of current technologies for reproduction, including sperm and egg donation, in-vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogacy, and cloning (in the near-future). Each issue creates separate legal and social issues, and the emotional reaction to each is often very different. Most opposition to these technologies comes from those who feel, correctly, that the use of such technologies is somehow unnatural.  But what is really "natural" in human reproduction and raising children, especially from a legal perspective?

• What seems to bother people most is not so much the actual techniques -- the "mechanics" of various assistive technologies -- but rather the social and personal implications. Imagine, for a moment, a future society that births children in hospital "hatcheries" (such as in Huxley's Brave New World). If these children are raised communally and indoctrinated with drugs to control their development as they were in the novel, well, most of us would be horrified. But if the children were adopted into loving families who care for them as families do now, well, it's still unnatural...but not so bad.

• As another example, suppose a couple in which the man is infertile chooses to use donated sperm to have a child via IVF: is this a form of adultry -- legally, morally, or religiously? Who is the "real" father in this case? I suspect that, aside from deeply-held religious objections, this case is not really a difficult moral problem, because our society's definition of "fatherhood" is broad enough to encompass someone who is not genetically related to their child. Like a mug in my parent's cupboard attests, "Anyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a DAD."

What, if any, responsibilities (legal or moral) do donors have to their biological offspring?

• This is covered in much greater depth in a later lecture, but it bought to my mind a frightening aside from the novel Next by the late Michael Crichton. In this brief side-story, a wealthy businessman finds himself suddenly confronted by a young woman claiming to be his daughter, created from sperm he donated to a sperm bank when he was in college. The man isn't sure how to deal with this, but the woman is: she has a lawyer, and her eyes are on the cash -- she claims that he has a legal and financial obligation to provide for her.

Is it acceptable for a single woman to use donor material to have a child? Of course, single women have children all the time, but assistive technology allows for the possibility of children without a father playing any role at all in the relationship. Is that ok? Although studies have shown that children benefit from having two parents when growing up, is this evidence strong enough to consider children as having a "right" to a father?

• I think any legal attempt to limit this would be absurd; after all, we don't expect pregnant women whose parter/husband dies before the child is born to remarry, much less legally obligate them to do so.

Similarly, donor material allows for two women in a relationship to have children. With donor material, a resulting child would only be genetically related to one of the women, but new technology may allow for the child to actually be related to both. Do you think it's ok for a lesbian couple to raise children of their own? What about two men -- is it ok for them to adopt? Most objections to this are from those who believe that such couples aren't fit to raise children. Others fear that children raised by a homosexual couple will themselves be more likely to become gay (studies have largely disproven this) or will somehow be maladjusted (studies have also disproven this), while others simply dislike the deviation from the "natural" family on emotional or religious grounds. Here is a good summary of the debate.

• I personally see no harm in allowing such couples to raise children; these days, stable two-parent mom 'n dad families are becoming the ideal rather than the norm, and plenty of children are raised in "non-standard" family units. If a couple that is biologically incapable of producing offspring cares enough to go through the difficulties of having a child via technology or adoption, they're probably more committed to lovingly raising a child than many other couples (or single parents) are. While many people will disapprove of allowing such families to exist at all, I see no need for legal restrictions.

More questions to think about from this lecture:

1. Can the use of reproductive technologies be equated to life support for the terminally ill? They're both an "unnatural" intervention in life. (This issue is covered in much greater depth in a later lecture).
2. Is the availability and use of reproductive technology good or bad for society as a whole? If we somehow could, would it be better to just forget all about them and never use them?
3. Are children conceived via technology somehow unnatural themselves? Are they less "human" than naturally-conceived children? Many works of science-fiction depict dystopian futures were clones are somehow sub-human, or those who haven't (or have) been genetically enhanced are treated differently by society and the law. Is there any truth to this? Should they be treated differently by the law? Why or why not?

"Tough Times: Thoughts on the Library Job Market from a Department Head Who Just Hired a Reference Librarian"

~From a recent blog posting on ricklibrarian. Here are some highlights (or perhaps I should say, lowlights):

• "...I was still surprised by the huge response to the posting of a full time reference librarian's position at my library. In the past, we had never gotten more than about forty applicants for a job that we posted...After I posted our position in April, I received seventy-eight applications."

• "From my reading of the letters and resumes, I sense that under-employed is the new norm for young librarians...New graduates from library school have these now experienced librarians competing for the same few jobs."

• "This is not the time to push prospective librarians to attend library school. Only those people who know the current conditions and who either have a job already lined up or are willing to risk spending a few years under-employed should start working for a degree."

Well...great. That's just great. It hardly qualifies as news, and didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but still...it really hit home. In six months of near-frantic searching for a library job, I've received exactly two interviews (one of which was over a phone). Perhaps it's time for me to move on, but to what? As time passes, I'm feeling increasingly disconnected, for lack of a better term. Since completing my undergraduate education, I've drifted from job to job, never staying very long in anything. I've never really had a "career". Now I find myself speaking less and less with my friends and relatives, because every conversation, every interaction, somehow wends its way back to employment, what one is "doing"...and that's where it gets awkward. Awkwardness is not conducive to further or future interaction.

I don't really understand how I've ended up here. I had/have all the benefits: great family, excellent education, car, no debt. Things that billions of people would be thrilled to attain, and indeed, I'm very grateful. But I can't shake the idea that I really should be doing better as a way of returning this cosmic favor. I ought to be a young professional, perhaps starting a family of my own. Or perhaps I should be an entrepreneur or self-employed, building a business and reputation. Instead, I feel as if I'm in stasis, not going anywhere, and not growing as a person. I'm confused as to whether I'm currently doing the right thing ("everyone's in the same situation, just hang in there!"...and hang...and hang...and hang...), or whether I simply lack the willpower to actually take a chance and try something else, as by doing so I would be wasting my increasingly-less-valuable investment.

So what are my options? I can continue to do what I'm doing, chasing down leads, filling out applications, sending out resumes...but perhaps, as the above posting and a disturbing wealth of related information indicates, perhaps that is not the best option for me right now. I've just gotten out of school again (or at least I did six months ago), and I'm not exactly keen to go back, but perhaps I should take a look at what work is actually available, instead of trying to chase down something well-suited for me that does not actually exist.

Sometimes I get the urge to just get in my car and drive off in a random direction (presumably not east, as my vehicle is not amphibious) until I find something worth doing, but I'm pretty sure such an urge comes from having read too many works of fiction. After all, unless you make one up, there is no actual plot-line to life. Besides, gas is expensive.